E-learning services are starting for conveying class contents to students (learners, course pupils) in remote areas by communication networks. In Japan, the main trend in services offering E-learning is asynchronous E-learning for providing asynchronous instruction typically by web-based education, or synchronous E-learning for providing synchronous instruction using satellite communication, TV telephone, or ASP, etc.
In asynchronous E-learning, the educational contents are created in advance and the student can utilize those contents to repeatedly receive instruction on those points the student did not sufficiently understand.
In synchronous E-learning, the class is conducted at a time determined in advance and students who could not participate or audit that class must review long term video data on that class. Student including those who participated or audited the class can confirm whether they understood the contents of the class by solving review problems. However few measures are available for supplemental instruction of portions of the class not properly understood.
To resolve these problems, a remote lecture assist device to assess the degree of subject comprehension and provide suitable multimedia learning material at student sites were proposed (See for example patent document 1.).
A teaching assist system was proposed for centralized control of the display on the instructor terminal, and sharing of the application among the instructor terminal and student terminal; allowing joint changes according to the purpose of use and lecture format, and distributing, calculating and displaying practice problems from the instructor terminal; and displaying the name of the application being run on the student terminal, student requests, and student image, and making it easy for the instructor to find the student operating status, situation and degree of comprehension, and making it easy for the student to convey his own requests to the instructor (See for example patent document 2.).
A method was proposed for easily finding the degree of comprehension of each student as needed by the instructor by using questionnaires on the lecture to the students (See for example patent document 3.).
A remote instruction system was proposed for verifying from the network, the degree of comprehension of each student in a hybrid type remote instruction system having instructional contents at both the server and the client (See for example patent document 4.).    [Patent document 1]
JP-A No. 62173/1997    [Patent document 2]
JP-A No. 123923/1998    [Patent document 3]
JP-A No. 333538/1998    [Patent document 4]
JP-A No. 249540/1999
In the about technology of the related art for synchronous E-learning, the student was able to repeatedly view video information on the lesson by recording it. However, unless all the video information was viewed from beginning to end, the student could not understand or verify his understanding of the contents of that video information.
Further, tutoring by advice given from instructor or tutor was carried out by the student himself by questions over the telephone or by writing mail. In such cases, the subject was limited only to sections that the student was aware he did not understand. So no tutoring was received on other sections of the subject that the student was not aware he needed help in understanding. This related art also had the problem that in many cases the replies to student questions by mail or other means were sent in the order handled by the instructor, so it was impossible to review those questions during instruction in real time.